Cytherea Part 15

With an involuntary and brutal movement he took her in his arms and kissed her with a flame-like and intolerable pa.s.sion. She made no effort to avoid him, but met his embrace with an intensity that rivalled his own. When he released her she wavered and half fell on a chair across the low back of which her arm hung supinely. The lightning, he thought, had struck him. Winding in and through his surging, tempestuous emotion was an objective realization of what was happening to him: this wasn't a comfortable, superficially sensual affair such as he had had with Anette. He had seen, in steel mills, great shops with perspectives of tremendous irresistible machines, and now he had the sensation of having been thrown, whirling, among them.

Savina's head went so far back that her throat was strained in a white bow. He kissed her again, with his hands crus.h.i.+ng the cool metallic filaments of the artificial flowers on her shoulders. She exclaimed, "Oh!" in a small startled unfamiliar voice. This would not do, he told himself deliberately, with a separate emphasis on each word. William Grove might conceivably come in at any moment; and there was no hope, no possibility, of his wife quickly regaining her balance; she was as shattered, as limply weak, as though she were in a faint. "Savina,"

he said, using for the first time that name, "you must get yourself together; I can't have you exposed like this to accident."

She smiled wanly, in response, and then sat upright moving her body, her arms, with an air of insuperable weariness. Her expression was dazed; but, instinctively, she rearranged her slightly disordered hair.

"We must find out what has happened to us," he went on, speaking with difficulty out of the turmoil of his being. "We are not young," he repeated stupidly; "and not foolish. We won't let ourselves be carried away beyond--beyond return."

"You are so wise," she a.s.sented, with an entire honesty of intention; but her phrase mocked him ferociously.

The tide of his own emotion was gathering around him with the force of a sea like that of which she had already, vividly, spoken. There was d.a.m.ned little of what could be recognized as admissible wisdom in him.

Instead of that he was being inundated by a recklessness of desire that reached Savina's desperate indifference to what, however threatening, might overtake her. He couldn't, he hadn't the inclination to, do less.

Reaching up, she drew her fingers down his sleeves until they rested in his gripping hands. Her palms clung to his, and then she broke away from him:

"I want to be outraged!" Her low ringing cry seemed suppressed, deadened, as though the damask and florid gilt and rosewood, now inexpressibly shocked, had combined to m.u.f.fle the expression, the agony, of her body. Even Lee Randon was appalled before the nakedness left by the tearing away of everything imposed upon her. She should have said that, he realized, unutterably sad, long ago, to William Grove. But, instead, she had told him; and, whatever the consequences might be, he must meet them. He had searched for this, for the potency in which lay the meaning of Cytherea, and he had found it. He had looked for trouble, and it was his in the realization alone that he could not, now, go home tomorrow morning.

In his room the tropical fruits and whiskey and cigarettes were by his bed, the percolator ready for morning; and, stopping in his preparations for the night, he mixed himself a drink and sat moodily over it. What had happened downstairs seemed, more than anything else, astounding; Mrs. Grove, Savina, had bewildered him with the power, the bitterness, of her feeling. At the thought of her shaken with pa.s.sionate emotion his own nerves responded and the racing of his blood was audible in his head. What had happened he didn't regret; dwelling on it, the memory was almost as sharply pleasant as the reality; yet he wasn't concerned with the present, but of the future--tomorrow.

He should, probably, get home late in the afternoon or in the evening; and what he told himself was that he wouldn't come back to the Groves, to Savina. The risk, the folly, was too great. Recalling his conclusions about the attachments of men of his age, he had no illusion about the possibly ideal character of an intimacy with William Grove's wife; she, as well, had illuminated that beyond any obscurity of motive or ultimate result. Lee's mind s.h.i.+fted to a speculation about the cause of their--their accident. No conscious act, no desire, of his had brought it on them; and it was evident that no conscious wish of hers had materialized their unrestrainable kisses. Savina's life, beyond question, must have been largely spent in hiding, combatting, her secret--the fact that her emotion was too great for life.

However, Lee Randon didn't try to tell himself that no other man had shared his discovery; indeed, Savina, too, had wisely avoided that challenge to his experience and wisdom. Like her he deliberately turned away from the past; and, in the natural chemistry of that act, the provision for his masculine egotism, it was dissolved into nothingness.

He was concentrated on the incident in the library: dancing with her, he had held her in a far greater, a prolonged, intimacy of contact; something in the moment, a surprising of her defences, a slight weariness in a struggle which must often seem to her unendurable, had betrayed her. Nothing, then, than what had occurred, could have been farther from his mind; he had never connected Mrs. Grove with such a possibility; she hadn't, the truth was, at first attracted him in that way. Now he thought that he had been blind to have missed her resemblance to Cytherea. She was Cytherea! This, in a measure, accounted for him, since, with so much to consider, he badly needed an accounting.

It wasn't simply, here, that he had kissed a married woman; there was nothing revolutionary or specially threatening in that; it was the sensation of danger, of lightning, the recognition of that profoundly disturbing countenance, which filled him with gravity and a determined plan of restraint.

He recalled the fact that both Peyton Morris and Mina had insisted that they had not been responsible for what had overtaken them; at the time he had not credited this, he was certain that some significant preliminaries had been indulged in; but positively Savina and he had been swept off their feet. A sense of helplessness, of the extreme danger of existence, permeated and weakened his opposing determination--he had no choice, no freedom of will; nothing august, in him or outside, had come to his a.s.sistance. In addition to this, he was--as in maturity he had always been--without a convenient recognition of right and wrong. What he princ.i.p.ally felt about Savina was a helpless sense of tragedy, that and a hatred for the world, for the tepid society, which had no use for high pa.s.sion.

To have kissed her, under the circ.u.mstances, appeared to him not only natural, but inevitable; and he was suffering from no feeling of guilt; neither toward William Grove, in whose house he was a guest, nor to f.a.n.n.y--those widely heralded att.i.tudes were largely a part of a public hypocrisy which had no place in the attempted honesty of his thoughts.

Lee was merely mapping out a course in the direction of worldly wisdom.

Then, inconsistently leaving that promise of security, he reviewed every moment, every thrilling breath, with Savina Grove after the Davencotts had gone: he felt, in exact warm similitude, her body pressed against his, her parted lips; he heard the little escaping "Ah!" of her fervor.

He put his gla.s.s down abruptly and tramped from wall to wall, his unb.u.t.toned silk waistcoat swinging about his arms. Lee Randon now cursed himself, he cursed Savina, but most of all he cursed William Grove, sleeping in complacent ignorance beside his wife. His imagination, aroused and then defrauded, became violent, wilfully obscene, and his profanity emerged from thought to rasping sound. His forehead, he discovered, was wet, and he dropped once more into the chair by the laden tray, took a deep drink from a fresh concoction. "This won't do," he said; "it's crazy." And he resumed the comforting relief that tomorrow would be different: he'd say good-bye to the Groves together and, in four hours, he'd be back in Eastlake. The children, if he took a late train, would be in bed, and f.a.n.n.y, with her feet on the stool, engaged with her fancy work.

Then his revolving thoughts took him back to the unanswered mystery of what, actually, had happened to Savina and him. He lost her for Cytherea, he lost Cytherea in her; the two, the immobile doll and the woman torn with vitality, merged to confound him. In the consideration of Savina and himself, he discovered that they, too, were alike; yet, while he had looked for a beauty, a quality, without a name, a substance, Savina wanted a reality every particle of which she had experienced and achingly knew. He, more or less, was troubled by a vision, but her necessity was recognizable in flesh. There, it might be again, she was more fortunate, stronger, superior. It didn't matter.

No inclination to sleep drugged the activity of his mind or promised him the release, the medicine, of a temporary oblivion. He had a recurrence of the rebellious spirit, in which he wondered if Grove did sleep in the same room with Savina. And then increasingly he got what he called a hold on himself. All that troubled him seemed to lift, to melt into a state where the hopeless was irradiated with tender memories. His mood changed to a pervasive melancholy in which he recalled the lost possibilities of his early ambitions, the ambitions that, without form or encouragement, had gone down before definite developments. When he spoke of these, tentatively, to f.a.n.n.y, she always replied serenely that she was thankful for him as he was, she would not have liked him to be anything queer.

But if he had met Savina first, and married her, his career would have been something else entirely; now, probably--so fiercely their combined flame would have burned--it would be over. However, during its course--he drew in a long audible breath. It was no good thinking of that! He completed his preparations for the night; but he still lingered, some of the drink remained. Lee was glad that he had grown quieter, reflective, middle-aged; it was absurd, undignified, for him to imitate the transports of the young. It pleased him, though, to realize that he wasn't done, extinguished, yet; he might play court tennis--it wasn't as violent as racquets or squash--and get back a little of his lapsed agility; better still, he'd ride more, take three days a week, he could well afford to, instead of only Sat.u.r.day and holidays in the country.

It was a mistake to disparage continually the life, the pleasures and friends, he had--the friends he had gathered through long arduous years of effort. He must grow more familiar with Helena and Gregory, too; no one had handsomer or finer children. And there was f.a.n.n.y--for one friend of his she had ten; she was universally liked and admired. Lee was, at last, in bed; but sleep continued to evade him. He didn't fall asleep, but sank into a waking dose; his mind was clear, but not governed by his conscious will; it seemed to him that there was no Savina Grove, but only Cytherea; her smile, her fascination, everywhere followed him. A d.a.m.ned funny business, life! At times its secret, the meaning of love, was almost clear, and then, about to be freed by knowledge, his thoughts would break, grow confused, and leave him still baffled.

Lee Randon was startled to find the brightness of morning penetrating his eyes; ready for his bath, with the percolator choking and bubbling in the next room, he rehea.r.s.ed, reaffirmed, all that he had decided the night before. No one was with him at the breakfast table elaborate with repousse silver and embroidered linen and iced fruit; but, returning upstairs, he saw Savina in her biscuit-colored suit in the library.

"William had to go to Was.h.i.+ngton," she told him; "he left his regrets."

She was, Lee perceived, almost haggard, with restless hands; but she didn't avoid his gaze. She stood by the table, one hand, gloved, slightly behind her on it. Bending forward he kissed her more intently, more pa.s.sionately, more wholly, than ever before.

"I hadn't meant to do that," he said; but his speech was only mechanical, as though, when he had once made it up, it discharged itself, in a condition where it was no longer valid, in spite of him.

Savina replied with a silent smile. Her drawn appearance had gone; she was animated, sparkling, with vitality; even her body seemed fuller.

"We shall have a long unbroken day together," she told him; "I have to go out for an hour, and then it will begin, here, I think, with lunch."

"I ought to be back in Eastlake," he confessed.

"Don't think of that till it comes. Eastlake has had you a long time, compared with a day. But there are days and days." They kissed each other. "I'll go now." She kissed Lee. "Lunch will be at two." He kissed her. He didn't leave the library until a maid announced that lunch was ready and the fact of her return. At the table they spoke but little; Lee Randon was enveloped in a luxurious feeling--where Savina was concerned--of security; there was no need to hurry; the day lengthened out into the night and an infinity of happy minutes and opportunities.

They discussed, however, what to do with it.

"I'd like to go out to dinner," she decided; "and then a theatre, but nothing more serious than a spectacle: any one of the Follies. I am sick of Carnegie Hall and pianists and William's solemn box at the Opera; and afterwards we'll go back to that cafe and drink champagne and dance."

That, he declared, with a small inner sinking at the thought of f.a.n.n.y, would be splendid. "And this afternoon--?"

"We'll be together."

They returned to the library--more secluded from servants and callers than the rooms on the lower floor--where, at one end of the ma.s.sive lounge, they smoked and Savina talked. "I hardly went to sleep at all,"

she admitted; "I thought of you every second. Do you think your wife would like me?" She asked the vain question which no woman in her situation seemed able to avoid.

"Of course," he lied heroically.

"I want her to, although I can't, somehow, connect you with her; I can't see you married. No doubt because I don't want to; it makes me wretched." She half turned in his arms, pressed hard against him, and plunged her gaze into his.

"It often seems strange to me," he admitted, caught in the three-fold difficulty of the truth, his feeling for her, and a complete niceness in whatever touched f.a.n.n.y. He attempted to explain. "Everything about my home is perfect, but, at times, and I can't make out why, it doesn't seem mine. It might, from the way I feel, belong to another man--the house and f.a.n.n.y and the children. I stand in it all as though I had suddenly waked from a dream, as though what were around me had lasted somehow from the dream into life." He repeated to her the process of his thoughts, feelings, at once so familiar and inexplicable.

She wasn't, he found, deeply interested in his explanation; she was careless of anything but the immediate present. Savina never mentioned William Grove. Animated by countless tender inventive expressions of her pa.s.sion, she gave the impression of listening to the inflections of his voice rather than attending, considering, its meanings. She was more fully surrendered to the situation than he. The disorganized fragments of a hundred ideas and hints poured in rapid succession, back of his dominating emotion, through Lee's brain. He lost himself only in waves--the similitude to the sea persisted--regular, obliterating, but separate. Savina was far out in a tideless deep that swept the solidity of no land.

She was plastically what he willed; blurred, drunk, with sensation, she sat clasping rigidly the edge of his coat. But his will, he discovered, was limited: the surges of physical desire, rising and inundating, saturating him, broke continually and left him with the partly-formed whirling ideas. He named, to himself, the thing that hung over them; he considered it and put it away; he deferred the finality of their emotion. In this he was inferior, he became even slightly ridiculous--they couldn't continue kissing each other with the same emphasis hour after hour, and the emphasis could not be indefinitely multiplied; rather than meet the crescendo he drew into his region of cental obscurity.

Lee had to do this, he reminded himself, in view of Savina's utter surrender: he was responsible for whatever happened. Even here his infernal queerness--that the possession of the flesh wasn't what primarily moved him--was pursuing him: a peculiarity, he came to think, dangerously approaching the abnormal. In addition to that, however, he was not ready, prepared, to involve his future; for that, with Savina Grove, was most probable to follow. f.a.n.n.y was by no means absent from his mind, his wife and certain practical realities. And, as he had told himself before, he was not a seducer. What adventures he had accepted had been the minor experiments of his restlessness, and they all ended in the manner that had finished him with Anette, in dissatisfaction and a sense of waste.

Savina stirred and sighed. "I must ring for tea," she said regretfully; and, while the servant arranged the pots and decanters and pitchers, the napkins and filled dishes, Lee paced up and down, smoking. When they were again alone her fingers stole under his arm:

"I adore you for--for everything." She had evaded the purpose of her speech. He wondered, with the exasperation of his over-wrought physical suspense, if she did. His ravishment had suffered a sharp natural decline reflected in a mental gloom. For the moment he desired nothing, valued nothing. And, in this mood, he became talkative; he poured a storm of pessimistic observation over Savina; and she listened with a rapt, transported, attention. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, in a silence coincident with dusk. The room slowly lost its sombre color and the sense of the confining walls; it became grey and apparently limitless; as monotonous, Lee Randon thought, as life. He was disturbed by a new feeling: that perversely, trivially, he had spoiled what should have been a priceless afternoon. It would never come back; what a fool he had been to waste in aimless talk any of the few hours which together they owned.

He whispered this to Savina, in his arms; but she would permit no criticism of him. It was time, she discovered, for them to dress for their party: "I don't want you to go. Why can't you be with me? But then, the servants! Lee, I am going to die when you leave. Tell me, how can I live, what am I to do, without you?" Since no satisfactory reply to that was possible, he stopped her troubled voice with a kiss. It was remarkable how many they had exchanged.

He had the feeling, the hope, that, with nothing irrevocable consummated, their parting would be easier; but he began to lose that comfortable a.s.surance. Again in his room, in the heavy choking folds of velvet draperies, he was grave; the mere excitation of the night before had gone. What was this, he asked himself, that he had got into? What had Cytherea to do with it? Ungallantly the majority of his thoughts were engaged with the possibility, the absolute necessity, of escape. By G.o.d, he must get out of it, or rather, get it out of him! But it wasn't too late; he could even finish the day, this delight, with safety.

Savina would recover--she had already thanked him for his self-control.

It was fortunate that she was a woman of distinction, of responsibilities, with a delicate habit of mind; another might have brought disaster, followed him to Eastlake. He recalled a story of George Sand tearing off her bodice before the house of a man she loved.

Yet... why hadn't he gone quietly away, early in the morning, before Savina was up? He was appalled at the depths to which he had fallen, the ignominious appearance that interrogated him from the pier-gla.s.s; Lee saw himself in the light of a coward--a cheap, safe sensation-maker.

Nothing was more contemptible. d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l, what was he? Where was he? Either he ought to go home or not, and the not carried the fullest possible significance. But he didn't want to do one or the other--he wanted Cytherea, or Savina, on some absurd impracticable plane, and f.a.n.n.y too. Why couldn't he go home when home was uppermost in his thoughts and do something else when it wasn't? Did the fact that f.a.n.n.y might happen to want him annul all his liberty in living; or, in place of that, were they, in spirit and body, one?

It was inevitable to the vacillating state of his being that, finding Savina in an exceptionally engaging black dress with floating sleeves of sheer lace and a string of rare pearls, he should forget all his doubts in the pleasure of their intimacy. Even now, in response to his gaze, her face lost its usual composure and became pinched, stricken, with feeling. Lee Randon was possessed by a recklessness that hardened him to everything but the present moment: such times were few in existence, hours of vivid living which alone made the dull weight of years supportable. This belonged to Savina and him; they were accountable only to each other. It was a sensation like the fortunate and exhilarating effect of exactly the right amount of wine. The emotion that flooded them had freed Lee from responsibility; sharpening one set of perceptions, it had obliterated the others, creating a spirit of holiday from which nothing prosaic, utilitarian, should detract.

They hadn't yet decided where to go for dinner; and, drawing aside into a small reception room to embrace and consider, they selected the Lafayette, because its Continental air a.s.sisted the illusion of their escape from all that was familiar and perfunctory. Their table, by a railing overlooking the sweep of the salle a manger, was precisely placed for their happiness. It was so narrow that the heels of Savina's slippers were sharply pressed into his insteps; when her hand fell forward it rested on his. Lee ordered a great deal, of which very little was eaten; the hors d'oeuvre appeared and vanished, followed by the soup and an entree; a ca.s.serole spread the savory odor of its contents between them; the salad was crisply, palely green, and ignored; and, before it seemed humanly possible, he had his cigar and was stirring the French coffee.

"Shall we be late for the theatre?" he asked indifferently.